I’m surprised Google hasn’t tried to turn GMail into a walled-garden yet. Not as an instant policy-change - but by starting by extending email (e.g. pushing everyone to use SMTP/TLS and initially refusing to send emails to SMTP recipients without TLS, then a few years later refusing to accept emails from unauthenticated message senders, then improving e-mail (e.g. interactive forms directly in emails, etc) in a way that only other Gmail users can benefit from (like iMessage vs SMS, despite using the same app and UI) - eventually Gmail would be too far ahead of everyone else for features and be walled-off. It hasn’t happened yet - but it _could_ happen - especially as more large companies are using or considering Gmail for their corporate e-mail.

Oh, but they already have.

Setup your email server following absolutely every best practice, even the most optional ones, then try to mail yourself on gmail. Then mark it as not spam. Then keep trying and you will figure out it already happened.

To be honest I think they are converting parts of Gmail (or the Calendar part) into a walled garden already.

I struggled yesterday to copy a work appointment from my Gmail Calendar in the web browser to my personal Calendar in Calendar.app on my Mac.

No option in Google Calendar to export the calendar event as an ICS at all. Google Calendar events also don’t seem to contain ICS files either. I think CalDAV and ICS are now niche enough that Google feels it can afford to neglect these.

So long as email has big competitors like Microsoft’s O365 Google can’t make a play to break email standards but if O365 declines in usage I bet Google will try to sow up the email market.

not..really? try running a personal server. its subject to all sorts of opaque policies wrt getting mail accepted by the big guys. at least can you host on some other big guy and probably be able to send, but I wouldn't say 'outside the reach'